Henry VIII King and Court - Hardcover

Weir, Alison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224060228 ISBN 13: 9780224060226

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

A detailed biography of Henry VIII, set against the cultural, social and political background of his court, and the splendour of his many sumptuous palaces. Seen from this new perspective, he emerges as a fully-rounded and realistic personality, not the two-dimensional caricature of popular misconception.

About this title

Review:

Henry VIII (1491-1547) casts a long shadow over English royalty and biography alike. In Henry VIII: King and Court, Alison Weir takes on this forbidding reputation to produce an admirably detailed, if somewhat cumbersome, biography of a king who married six times and presided over England's cataclysmic split with Roman Catholicism. Weir's main task is to overturn the "caricature" of Henry "as a man who thought of nothing but chasing the ladies, and who threw chicken bones over his shoulder". This seems a rather obvious characterisation to challenge, but Weir proceeds to amass an extraordinary wealth of detail about Henry's cultivated court, from its learning, architecture and political machinations, to how many people handled Henry's bedsheets and the food that his horses ate. The early sections get bogged down in too much detail, and detract from the political drama of Henry's growing estrangement from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and his fateful marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1532. The second section is much more convincing in tracing how "the young, idealist humanist with liberal ideas about kingship was giving way to a selfish, dogmatic tyrant", as Henry dispenses with Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne and then Cromwell, and the court increasingly sinks into factionalism and intrigue.

Weir's biography is a lively recreation of the everyday life of Henry, his court and what he called his "ill-conditioned wives", but it neglects the wider European dimensions of Henry's reign, and sweeps over many crucial aspects of the split with Rome. Detailed and scholarly, Henry VIII: King and Court provides a strangely colourless portrait of the most colourful of English monarchs. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

No English monarch has quite the hold on the popular imagination as Henry VIII. Although attempts to broaden our perception of him are legion, Alison Weir brings to her fascinatingly detailed study the kind of historical acumen and accessible prose style that distinguished her Elizabeth The Queen. Weir's publishers make the claim that she's the most readable popular historian of Tudor England, and it's hard to dispute that fact, with the background to Henry's reign assiduously created. She seems less interested in redefining our picture of Henry (who remains pretty much the larger-than-life figure we're used to), but there is a leavening of psychological insight that renders him as something more than the monster of egotism we might imagine him to be. The delight here is in the detail, with a rich supporting cast of courtiers and ministers, nobles and commoners. Weir shows Henry as the principal instrument of change in a deeply divided society, and we certainly understand him more by the end of this mammoth study.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0224060228
• ISBN 13: 9780224060226
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656